Lavonardo

Following the presentation of the original Carcassonne last week, let’s continue the irregular series with the sole spin-off game I’ve bought thus far.

Carcassonne: The Castle is Reiner Knizia’s take on the concept, and while the basic mechanic is unaltered from the original, the courtyard-building game is quite a different beast.

While the original work with just two players, the experience is not as good as with three or four, as the resources dwindle too early in the set. The Castle has been constructed for two players, and two players only.

The playing field is limited to the castle walls, so the design cannot uncontrollably spiral out. The surrounding wall serves as the scoring track also, with tower crenellations bearing bonus tiles for the player whose meeple lands on the exact spots.

While the tile-laying/meeple-placing mechanic is carried over as-is from the basic Carcassonne, the tile-placement rules are far looser in this game. Only the roads have to match, the rest of the construction can be as chaotic as it gets. As with the King/Scout expansion to the basic Carcassonne game, the sizes of constructed elements matter – the owner of the biggest house gets to claim points for the unconstructed squares in the end. Unlike the original, in the Castle incomplete features do not bring in any points (unless a corresponding bonus tile has been previously obtained from the scoring track).

Knizia’s take of Carcassonne is a good variant, and works well as a two-player game. The interaction between players is as minimal as in the original, but the enforced tightness of the area does force the constructions to collide sooner or later. The fields remain important, but the game is usually not won over their control, as the criss-crossing paths bisect the courtyard into cleanly separate areas.

As the Boardgamegeek page notes, no expansions nor a digital version of the game exists. The game feels complete enough without the former, but a good Live Arcade game would be appreciated indeed.

Carcassonne is the board game whose finnish edition back in 2004 kickstarted the new boardgame boom.

Originally designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, the game has reaped award after award around the world.

It’s an easy game to learn, but due to its random nature very hard to master.

The game centers on the chaotic town of Carcassonne in the southern France. The randomly created gameboard mimics the layout of the medieval town and its surroundings – the fields surround small hamlets and monasteries, crisscrossed with roads.

Carcassonne features some interaction between players, but it’s mostly a simple resource management game. Each player has a limited number of citizen pieces, and their appropriate placement on the newly constructed structures is the key to victory. The game works out best when there are three to five players, but it is enjoyable with two players also.

Carcassonne has given birth to a number of expansions and spin-off games. The former add elements to the basic game (ranging from extra tiles to magic and a wooden catapult used to shoot tokens onto the playing field). The latter transplant the basic tile/citizen-mechanic is to other environments (ranging from stone age to the conquest of the Americas).

Sierra has crafted a competent version of the game for the Xbox 360 Live Arcade.

All in all Carcassonne has served well as an introduction to the world of modern board games (tigether with Guillotine the duo has been responsible for attracting quite a few new players).

When the world seems to have too much fairness, and things seem to be settling down to expected moulds, it’s time to try out bastard tetris, a game that actively plays against you.

An easy way to appreciate the game is the recently released flash version.

Yeah, you might have had a pretty good day.

Been playing a couple of games of TypeRacer, and politely reminded that learning the 10-finger system is not a mandatory part of the finnish curriculum.

My rather unorthodox typing style does not lend itself well to scoring high in the game. Though let it be known that the incredibly low score in the first game was due to capitalization confusion (blatantly missed the immediate and pointed feedback provided by the game).

But it can only improve with practice.

And the act of racing a car with your wpm (to lyrics of random songs and many other sources) is actually rather a pleasant way of getting typing exercise.

If the prospect of a postmodern webgame that concentrates on the wrong side of the internet culture appeals to you at all, ForumWarz is heavily recommended.

ForumWarz is a beautifully realized implementation that emulates the whole internet in a single browser window – be it forums, instant messaging, misanthropic people, suspicious webstores or spam, it’s all here. And as a game it’s a great parody

Me, I’m a third level troll, on track to pwn as many forums as possible with tools such as spoiler generation and gratuitous ASCII art.

EDIT (16.3.2008): Andy Baio interviews the authors. It’s not your average interview:

We used to drink beer and go out for dinner at every meeting, but after a couple of months that got expensive and unproductive.